Fashion Week Live

It all started as a weird question in my head: how can you make the best, most interesting and most updated magazine about fashion week?

At GadeMode.dk we have been writing about Copenhagen Fashion Week for the past two seasons, however, our coverage has only been sporadic and based on the interests of our team of photographers. In January 2010 I felt it was time to do something more cool. I wanted to produce at separate online magazine specifically about fashion week with an (almost) live stream of content. I set up a few basic premises: (1) everything must be online within an hour after it took place, (2) everything must be professional (3) the magazine should cover everything from shows, events, fashion fairs and street style, (4) the magazine should be independent of fashion industry sponsors.
Then I started recruiting people to help me. First I asked Sofie Hallas if she wanted to help out as a primary coordinator and editor, and from there it went crazy. Sofie and I met only three weeks before fashion week started, and we had nothing but this crazy idea. Additionally I also had a Master’s thesis that I needed to finish so I didn’t have time for a full time commitment. We set up our temporary headquarters at Yellow Cock Studio, and while Sofie took charge of coordinating invites to all the different shows, I recruited more people. Within the first week we had access to 80% of all the shows and a staff of 15 dedicated fashion journalists and photographers, one professional proof reader and a really cool driver. We also found a name: Fashion Week Live was born.
Then we started working on non-fashion-industry sponsors and got a free phone-system to handle incoming calls, 3G internet to allow the journalists to upload text and photos directly from the venues, and a huge office in central Copenhagen that we could use as a temporary base during the week. We produced business cards, banners, logos for our car, and prepared.

So what is Fashion Week Live? Is it another fashion blog? Is it a magazine?

So what is Fashion Week Live? Is it another fashion blog? Is it a magazine? To me it has elements of both: we have the professional organization of big a magazine with efficient transport, an information infrastructure, procedures, professional proof reading and a huge team of journalists and photographers, but we also have the independence and speed of a blog. We can publish almost instantly and we have no sponsors or advertisers with conflicting interests.

The result? Fashionweeklive.dk opened on February 9th, and without spending a single dollar on advertisements we had more than 60.000 page views in the following week, with record low bounce rates. We produced 124 professional posts with more than 1000 photos.

If you want to hear more about Fashion Week Live, entrepreneurship, leadership and volunteer projects, I’m available for inspirational talks.